Biased attentional processing of threat-related information may have a role in the etiology and maintenance of various psychopathologies including anxiety, mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, substance-related and addictive disorders, and/or the like. Attention bias modification (ABM) may refer to treatment techniques in cognitive-neuroscience that target aberrant threat-related attention patterns in anxiety disorders and other psychopathologies as mentioned above.
Attention bias modification techniques may be based on reaction time (RT) paradigms that indicate that successful bias modification is associated with symptom reduction. However, efficacy of RT-based bias modification treatments may be inconsistent across techniques, possibly from a failure of some RT-based protocols to effectively engage aberrant attentional processes. RT measures of attention bias may possess poor psychometrics and may capture indirect effects of attention. This may be because RT-based indices of biases reflect behaviors occurring at the end of a complex process, which unfolds dynamically from the point of threat detection, thus failing to capture key aspects of attention allocation.
Moreover, RT-based ABM protocols may utilize many monotonous trials and may be experienced as tedious, potentially reducing treatment engagement. In contrast, eye-tracking measures may provide better therapeutic targets for attention bias modification. For example, relative to healthy controls, patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibit increased attentional dwelling on social threats and patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) dwell longer on dysphoric stimuli and less on positive stimuli, providing viable targets for therapeutic methods.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the figures.